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Hans-Georg Maassen (photo from January 2020)
Photo: Heiko Rebsch / dpa
The CDU has given the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, a deadline to leave the party.
As SPIEGEL learned from party circles, party leader Friedrich Merz wants to present a resolution to the federal executive committee on February 13, in which Maassen is asked to leave the CDU independently.
If he does not do this, an expulsion procedure will be initiated immediately.
According to SPIEGEL information, a digital meeting of the presidium has been taking place since this Monday morning at 10 a.m. to discuss how the party leadership should proceed.
The CDU had previously had Maassen's party exclusion carefully examined after he had attracted attention with disturbing statements (read more about this here).
Maassen, who belongs to the CDU state association in Thuringia, recently claimed in an interview with the author Alexander Wallasch on his platform that there is racism towards white people.
Not recognizing this is "an expression of a green-red racial theory, according to which whites are regarded as an inferior race and one must therefore bring Arab and African men into the country".
Wallasch has been noticed several times in recent years by the spread of conspiracy myths.
Maassen has also been disturbing his party for years with right-wing conspiracy theories.
Last weekend he was elected chairman of the “Union of Values”.
Members of the party leadership then took a clear stand.
The "Union of Values" sees itself as a group of conservative Christian Democrats.
It operates as a registered association and is not one of the official party organizations.
According to the group, it has around 4,000 members.
The deputy CDU chairwoman Silvia Breher told SPIEGEL: "The union of values does not belong to the CDU - she herself makes that more than clear again and again!
I can well imagine that we will discuss and examine an incompatibility.« Karin Prien, also deputy federal chairwoman, pushed for an incompatibility decision on Sunday evening.
She told the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" that the "Union of Values" was "an association clearly outside the CDU, which presumes to want to shift the discourse within the CDU clearly to the right, towards the AfD".
Maassen's election as chairman of the "Union of Values" is "after a large number of lapses, the final proof that membership in this group does not fit with Christian Democratic values".
She therefore also considers an incompatibility decision by the CDU against this group to be "inevitable," said Prien.